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That was then, this is now

They were some of the biggest names of the ’80s and
’90s, and then seemed to disappear from public life. Melissa
Kent and Craig Mathieson find out what Merril, Tonia, Jessica,
Greg, Peter, Tania, Jo and Jack did next.

Tania Lacy

For a time Tania Lacy was the enfant terrible of
youth TV, a pig-tailed wild child who terrorised prime ministers
and pop stars with her mischievous brand of ambush comedy on The
Factory and Countdown Revolution.

But then in 1990, her on-screen career came to a halt when she and
co-host Mark Little were dumped by the ABC for staging an on-air
protest against bands miming.

She bounced back in 1997, however, in the celebrated short film
Titsiana Booberini, about a lovelorn checkout chick with a hirsute
lip. Instead of being Lacy’s golden ticket - as it was
for director Robert Luketic, who went on to direct Legally
Blonde - the film became the source of a bitter legal wrangle
over authorship between Lacy, Luketic and Miramax.

“Essentially Robert wouldn’t let go of the film and the
title,” she says. “I wrote the film and Titsiana was my
character for a long time before I met Robert Luketic but he claims
he wrote it.”

Lacy says she was offered a settlement by Miramax but turned it
down, demanding instead to be credited as writer and creator. The
dispute, which she has never spoken about publicly before and
remains unresolved, dented her confidence and passion for
performing. Instead, she turned to scriptwriting and editing,
working on Nine’s teen girl series G2G and her own feature
film, Virtually Kitty, with producer Gill Carr.

A typical day involves beavering away on her laptop in a St Kilda
cafe before rushing off to pick up Per, her four-year-old son with
German husband Ole Sturm. She’s also preparing a return to
the stage with a Fringe Festival show involving some of her old
television characters, including Carlos the Latin Lover and Annette
the Librarian.

Greg Arnold

“These days,” jokes Greg Arnold,
“my gigs tend to start at 10 in the morning.” The
frontman and songwriter for Things of Stone and Wood, the folk rock
band that had a hit single in 1992 with Happy Birthday
Helen, now lectures in music as part of the Northern Melbourne
Institute of TAFE’s Bachelor of Australian Music program.

Some of his students know of his background in the music industry
and some don’t, but Arnold is sanguine about his time in the
spotlight. “You come across people who have one song that
tends to loom larger in the catalogue than others, but I
don’t have bad vibes about that song,” he says.

A love song that paid off - Arnold is now
married to the titular subject and they have two children -
Happy Birthday Helen put Things of Stone and Wood onto a
national stage. Their debut album, 1993’s The
Yearning, was a top 10 success, although the 1994 follow-up,
Junk Theatre, didn’t click and saw them part with
their major label.

“Suddenly you’re in this world being propelled by this
big machine which has all this weight placed behind you,” the
now 43-year-old observes. “It was confronting but I felt
determined to not be overwhelmed by it. But looking back, I’m
not sure that that’s possible.”

Arnold’s creative energy now goes into a side career as a
producer, while his own songwriting will next be heard with his new
band, the Swamp Dandies. Things of Stone and Wood haven’t
played for several years, he says, but that could change in 2010 as
this year marks the band’s 21st anniversary.

Jessica Muschamp

It’s been two decades since Sharon Davies
left Ramsay Street, but the legacy of three years on Neighbours
continues for the Melbourne actress who played her.

“People know me but they don’t know how,” says
Jessica Muschamp, 39. “I don’t normally mention that
it’s probably from Neighbours because I’ve had people
say ‘nah, I don’t watch that crap’! Then
you’re left with egg on your face.”

Muschamp landed the role of Sharon while completing her VCE in
1988. It was a plum job for an aspiring actress and the young
cast - which included Kylie Minogue and Guy Pearce -
“had a ball”. Sharon got up to all the usual
Erinsborough shenanigans, such as setting fire to the coffee shop
and pushing her love rival into a pool. But then came a cast exodus
in 1990, which saw Sharon set off for New Zealand.

“They had the head-shots of all the different characters
lined up above the mirrors and as people left, they’d turn
them upside down,” she recalls. “I remember dreading
the day my head got turned.”

After Neighbours, Muschamp moved to England, working in pantos and
on a children’s film where she met her husband Nick, who was
the on-set driver.

Eventually though, the Neighbours sheen wore off and she struggled
to find work. Instead she enrolled at the London Academy of Music
and Dramatic Arts, to re-learn her craft.

“Neighbours was a double-edged sword,” she says.
“In many ways it opened a lot of doors but in other ways
people thought I couldn’t do anything else. So I thought,
‘OK, how am I going to get around that?’ ”

These days she and Nick live in Frankston South with their two
daughters, Hollie, 7, and Hannah, 3. While motherhood has been her
focus, she is also writing and directing for stage and
television.

Jack Levi (aka Elliot Goblet)

“I could never kill him off because he’s an extension
of myself,” Levi says. “He’s an expression of my
fantasies. Elliot allows me to say things that I normally
couldn’t say.”

Goblet was “born” in 1981 after an acting coach told
Levi he’d never make it as an actor because he couldn’t
show facial expressions.

“I thought, ‘right, that’ll be my thing
then,” Levi laughs.

With his trademark goatee and dorky spectacles, Goblet made his
deadpan debut at a try-out night at The Last Laugh, where
he was discovered by a spotter for television talent quest show
You’re a Star.

The performance was seen by Daryl Somers, who offered him a regular
spot on the short-lived The Daryl Somers Show in 1982.
Goblet became a regular fixture on Hey Hey It’s
Saturday, The Big Gig, Tonight Live With Steve
Vizard and The Midday Show.

These days, Goblet exists only on the corporate speaking circuit,
which requires him to be friendlier and “less
weird”.

“I’m deadpan but friendly now because corporate
audiences need someone a bit more engaging,” Levi says.
“I punch out a smile and they say
‘wow!’.”

Levi is still passionate about comedy and last year launched a
cabaret comedy club, The Crimson Goat, which on March 14 moves into
new premises at Ormond Hall.

“I really lamented the loss of the great comedy and cabaret
scene we had in Melbourne in the ’70s and ’80s,”
he says. “And you never know, vintage Goblet may even pop by
some time.”

Tonia Todman

As you would expect, Australia’s answer to
Martha Stewart has not been idle since departing Good Morning
Australia five years ago.

Craft queen Tonia Todman, 62, has been busy deploying those
formidable skills with a glue gun and a pair of scissors on a
“gorgeous old pile of bluestone” near Kyneton.

Soon after GMA was axed, Todman and her master carpenter
husband Michael Dowding turned their attention to the restoration
of Highbank Hill Farm, a dilapidated stone property built in
1848.

“I’d done up a lot of old houses, but I’d never
seen anything as bad as this,” Todman recalls. “But
Michael took one look at it and said ‘yes we can fix
it’, so that was enough for me.”

Now beautifully transformed, it hosts
Todman’s home-making classes, in which she dispenses advice
on cooking, design, craft and gardening.

She also runs a catering business, a commercial rose garden that
supplies organically grown roses, and has just converted the
blacksmith’s and stables into a luxury B&B.

In some ways, Todman’s new career is not so different from
her days as a fi xture of lifestyle television, when her craft
segments on Healthy, Wealthy and Wise throughout the
’90s and later on GMA made her an authority on
everything from pin cushions to beeswax candles.

While she has hopes of returning to television, she’s also
realistic about it.

“I don’t know how to say it nicely, but older people in
Australia don’t have quite the same attraction as the younger
ones,” she laughs. “At least I have the wisdom and the
training and the track record. Whether that appeals to TV audiences
or not, who can say?”

Jo Pearson

“Some people don’t even realise
I’m not on the TV any more,” laughs former newsreader
Jo Pearson on the phone from London.

“In their minds I’m still doing the same thing because
that’s how they know me.”

In reality, it has been two decades since Pearson was one of
Melbourne’s best known newsreaders, her blonde bob popping up
in our lounge rooms every night with David Johnston on Ten’s
top-rating Eyewitness News.

In 1988 she was poached by Nine for a rumoured million-dollar
figure along with her then-husband, weatherman Rob Gell. While
Gell’s career went from strength to strength, Pearson’s
seemed to grind to a halt.

Stints on Live at Five with Terry Willesee and, later, a
Saturday afternoon lifestyle offering, Body and Soul,
followed in the early ’90s, but both petered out.

“Effectively there were no other jobs for me,” Pearson
says. “If something had been offered I would have found it
irresistible. The red light on top of the camera is like a flame to
a moth for a newsreader - you can’t resist
it.”

Instead, the former newspaper journo started her own business,
Media Strategies, which provides media training in crisis
management and public speaking.

These days she divides her time between Melbourne and her flat in
Ealing, west London, where business is booming.

“Increasingly I find myself working with people who had no
idea I worked in TV and that’s challenging when you are used
to being a famous face wherever you go,” she says.

While her television days are all but a distant memory, some
assignments stand out with intense clarity.

“I remember I had to escort Johnny Depp to a nightclub during
his 21 Jump Street days,” she recalls. “It
didn’t occur to me to be starstruck. If only I had my time
over.”

Merril Bainbridge

Many former musicians can sound bitter when
reflecting on the music industry. Merril Bainbridge is not one of
them.

“I was so lucky,” says the one time singer-songwriter,
who had a hit single and album in Australian in 1995 with
Mouth and The Garden respectively.

“I was blessed; I had a ball and I experienced every area of
the music industry before it collapsed. My life is completely
changed now.”

Bainbridge made the change in 2004, when she was about to release
her third album, having just had her first child. A brief tour made
clear how much time she’d be away from her husband and son,
which, combined with a belief that illegal downloading would gut
the record business, led to the decision to retire.

The lifelong Melburnian sold her recording studio and production
company and dedicated herself to her family (her son is now seven,
her daughter is three), having previously had Mouth sell
more than 600,000 copies in the US in 1996 and ’97.

“It was really full on and really exciting,” Bainbridge
recalls. “In the States we were in limos and had jets going
across the country. I visited 42 cities in six weeks. They really
worked me, enough to know what it would be like to live that life
all the time.”

At first Bainbridge’s creative energy went into improvising
songs for her children, but after finding it difficult to buy good
clothes for a breastfeeding mother she began work on a fashion
line, titled Peachy Mama, due for release this year.

“My life now,” she says, “gives me balance and
control.”

Peter Russell-Clarke

“G’day!” chuckles a familiar
voice on the phone. Time may have greyed the beard and annihilated
a few hair follicles, but Peter Russell-Clarke’s trademark
greeting remains intact.

It was with a friendly “g’day!” that he would
launch into his nightly cooking adventures on Come and Get
It, his ABC show that ran between The Goodies and
Doctor Who throughout the 1980s.

The show was enormously popular, particularly among
children who loved his ratbag sense of humour, running 900 episodes
before “someone finally realised what we were up
to”.

Cooking has always been one of Russell-Clarke’s many
passions: now 75, he describes himself, “when I care to,
which is not often”, as a writer, painter, political
cartoonist, cook and healthy eating advocate.

Painting now absorbs much of his time, and most days you’ll
find him in his studio on a tranquil bush block in Tooborac, 100
kilometres north of Melbourne, where he lives with his wife of 50
years, Jan.

The property belongs to their son Peter, 40, a software designer
for Apple who lives in San Francisco.

Things haven’t always been apples for the Russell-Clarkes: in
2001 they lost the lot when their Soho Lemon project, a citrus
plantation on the Bellarine Peninsula, went into
administration.

The 80 subscribers lost about $2.4 million. He is philosophical
about the financial failure.

“All it means is that I have no money and
having money doesn’t concern me one way or the other,”
he says. “All money does is allow you to buy more things but
I’m able to make things.”

In 2008 his profile soared again when a blooper reel of Come
and Get It out-takes was posted on YouTube.

It featured Russell-Clarke cursing cheerfully while delivering
cooking instructions, such as how to make scotch eggs by
“f---ing fry the c---s until they go black, you
prick”.

The aftermath may have lifted his profile among Gen Y-ers but he
reckons it cost him a bomb in contracts.

“People offer me a job and then they look at the blooper tape
and cancel the job,” he chuckles. “But I couldn’t
care less. From my point of view it sorts out the chaff from the
straw.”

1266687178528-theage.com.auhttp://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/that-was-then-this-is-now/2010/02/27/1266687178528.htmltheage.com.auThe Sunday Age2010-02-28That was then, this is nowEntertainmentArts